These questions Alick stood striving vainly to answer, while Master Marsden was being brushed and made look respectable by Bessie Ormson.
“I am as good as a mother to you, Harry,” she said.
“I am sure you are; but that’s not saying much,” answered the boy. “Mine has always a headache, and is constantly telling us not to make a noise. Noise, indeed! Women can make enough noise themselves, when they want to.”
“Do not say ‘want to,’ Harry, it is vulgar.”
“No more vulgar than you are,” he replied. “I shall talk as I like. What is good enough for pa ought to be good enough for you.”
“It is a fortunate thing for both of us that I am not your pa, as you call him,” Bessie answered, “for I should shake you to death some day. Now, are you ready, or are you going to keep us waiting all day?”
“You think you look so nice in that bonnet,” Harry sneered, “that you want to be off like a flash of lightning. You are none so pretty, some people think, though Harcourt, as my papa says, does imagine there is nobody like you. Pa says he would not marry you. I heard pa tell ma so, not a week before I came here.”
“I can’t wonder at that,” Bessie replied; “your papa probably finds he has married one too many of the family already.”
But this side stroke Master Marsden seemed unable perfectly to understand; wherefore he asked Bessie what she meant; in reply to which question he received the information that “children should not ask too many questions; and that, if he intended going with them to Fifield church, it was time he got his cap and went downstairs.”
In acknowledgment of all this instruction, Harry, pulling a face at Bessie, that young lady forthwith unceremoniously marched him off and gave him in charge of Cuthbert, who grumbled a little over the trust.